Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multitask well… When people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. "

"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"MEMS and nanotechnology utilize seemingly impossibly small mechanisms in order to sense, control and respond to a particular environment - these technologies can sense mechanical information as well as biological data. Many MEMS sensors function by detecting small electrical currents that provide data on things such as position, geomagnetic field, acceleration and more, and then pass this information along to other mechanisms within a device or machine. "

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"The really significant thing about AlphaGo is that it (and its creators) cannot explain its moves. And yet it plays a very difficult game expertly. So it's displaying a capability eerily similar to what we call intuition - "knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning". Up to now, we have regarded that as an exclusively human prerogative. It's what Newton was on about when he wrote "Hypotheses non fingo" in the second edition of his Principia: "I don't make hypotheses," he's saying, "I just know.""

"O'Neill recounts an exercise to improve service to homeless families in New York City, in which data-analysis was used to identify risk-factors for long-term homelessness. The problem, O'Neill describes, was that many of the factors in the existing data on homelessness were entangled with things like race (and its proxies, like ZIP codes, which map extensively to race in heavily segregated cities like New York). Using data that reflects racism in the system to train a machine-learning algorithm whose conclusions can't be readily understood runs the risk of embedding that racism in a new set of policies, these ones scrubbed clean of the appearance of bias with the application of objective-seeming mathematics. "

"Researchers at Incapsula have discovered a botnet that runs on compromised CCTV cameras. There are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of these in the field, and like many Internet of Things devices, their security is an afterthought and not fit for purpose. "

"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

"Anouk van Maris, a robot cognition specialist who is researching ethical human-robot interaction, has found that comfort levels with robots vary greatly depending on location and culture. "It depends on what you expect from it. Some people love it, others want to run away as soon as it starts moving," she says. "The advantage of a robot that looks human-like is that people feel more comfortable with it being close to them, and it is easier to communicate with it. The big disadvantage is that you expect it to be able to do human things and it often can't.""

"Pretty much every great thing gets started by a small team."

"There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book "Fake Photos," to be published in August, I'd like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax."

" filters are so expensive that only US Big Tech companies could afford them, and they are incapable of distinguishing fair dealing (including things like the music playing in the background of the video of your child's first steps) from infringement, and they are incredibly error prone, to say nothing of the problems of allowing anyone in the world to identify creative works as their copyright with no means to weed out false and fraudulent claims."

"But researchers have approximately zero clues as to why it's so good at it, and it doesn't help that the AI essentially taught itself to make these predictions. According to one researcher involved in the project, "We can build these models, but we don't know how they work.""

"Many of the countries buying into that technology, however, still lack the institutions and the legislative oversight to keep it under control. In young, volatile democracies especially, the lure of technological greatness is already coming at a great social cost. "The thing with technology is that it kind of becomes irresistible," says Professor Webster. "It's very tempting when it can do something for us more efficiently. But just because the technology can do something it doesn't mean we should use it.""

"People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth. How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Certain online sources get people to admit things they would not admit anywhere else. They serve as a digital truth serum. Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check."

"The animal matchmaking program isn't just for gorillas, and it takes some things into consideration that probably aren't on Tinder's radar. It scores every animal on a variety of traits (and when we say "every" animal, we mean there's an entry for each flamingo in each American zoo), including social skills, age, experience, family history, and interpersonal relationships. Oh, and genetic diversity. Animals with rare genes are more valuable to breeding programs because their offspring will introduce more genetic diversity into the dating pool."

"While some experts still disagree, most now believe that Conficker was the work of Ukrainian cybercriminals building a platform for global theft who succeeded beyond all expectation, or desire. The last thing a thief wants is to draw attention to himself. Conficker's unprecedented growth drew the alarmed attention of cybersecurity experts worldwide. It became, simply, too hot to use."

"The reason to look at humans is because there are certain things that humans do much better than deep-learning systems. That doesn't mean humans will ultimately be the right model. We want systems that have some properties of computers and some properties that have been borrowed from people. We don't want our AI systems to have bad memory just because people do. But since people are the only model of a system that can develop a deep understanding of something-literally the only model we've got-we need to take that model seriously."

"It is time now for two things: for people to wake up and realise how much our lives are dominated by such a small number of Silicon Valley bros, one hand in their jean pocket announcing their next move, and for tech companies to acknowledge their power and influence and become truly accountable."